Dec 14, 2010

The Humble Indie Bundle #2

The Humble Indie Bundle #2 (pay what you want for five awesome indie games)

Great games, even better than from the fist one. A real must have ...

Nov 2, 2010

Logitech HD Pro Webcam C910

So I got myself a nice modern webcam (Logitech HD Pro Webcam C910 for about ~90 EUR). But how does it work on Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat)? I wasn't sure if it worked at all. As it arrived today I can now say that it works well so far.

I did the following:

  1. Plugg it in a free USB port.
  2. Set the "Input" of the sound preferences to use the Webcam's build in mic (called "0821 Analog Stereo" here) if you want to use that one.
  3. Install cheese to try it out (or use Skype/Empathy and call a friend)
  4. Set the cheese capture resolution to what you want (open the preferences for that). For pictures use a high resolution, for video use a lower one as the framerate will be very bad on the higher resolutions.

So it worked well so far out of the box. I hope the linux drivers improve further as I think the video capturing is a bit low on the framerate side. Noteworthy is that the framerate is higher in Skype than in Cheese, so maybe its just the software that needs to improve. I didn't try it with Empathy so far.

Oct 18, 2010

Oct 12, 2010

So You Want To Be A Designer

So You Want To Be A Designer: Top 5 List - Aza on Design

very good 5 points. This is what I expect from someone who calls himself a designer..

Sep 29, 2010

James Gosling on stuff

The Basement Coders CrashPlan Give Away!

Some interesting bits:
"Because lawyers just like to make revenue. And I'm sure they were looking at the license fees they were getting from Microsoft. Microsoft .NET just smears over a huge pile of Sun patents. When they did the .NET design, they basically cut and pasted from the Java spec. The way that they did CLR, you know they swizzled the way the instruction set went but the way this thing really operated, they exercised essentially no creativity when coming up with .NET. They've done some things since then that have been kind of good but as part of the various court cases we ended up with this rather odd patent deal with them that involved them paying us fairly tasty amounts of money. And I'm sure that the lawyers looked at the Microsoft numbers and said, yeah I want that from Google"
"I mean this is one of the reasons that hardware manufacturers often don't open source their drivers. Because if they open source their drivers, then other hardware manufacturers will look at that and go, oh, well your hardware must stomp on this patent device. ... I've had more than on hardware manufacturer tell me that."
"It turns out there's a small issue with the way the sine and cosine hardware is implemented in the spec on the intel platform. And we actually work around it in software. For the ranges from plus or minus five, we are close to intel speeds. You get the larger values, where the intel thing rips. So lots of folks who use math on the Java platform because we do it accurately. We put a lot of effort into it. The fact that we actually cared about that, and lots of people depend on it, but its' not the kind of thing that Joe Hacker is going to do."
"But one of the terms at the time, 15 years ago, was that every software vendor had decided that the only platform they could support was Windows NT. So all the people who were writing software for Sun Systems 15 years ago was telling us they couldn't do it anymore. (50:00) Even though you guys have a better platform, they've got better volume. But IBM was getting the same message. Everybody was getting the message in the software community that they were shutting down development on everything except NT. And for a company like Sun at the time the equation was basically, if we don't do Java, if we don't give software developers a way to develop software for our platform without shutting themselves out from NT then they're just going to abandon us and we're dead."
"One of the sad things about android was they really didn't pay attention to security issues as much as they should have. Google is kind of a funny company because a lot of them have this peace love and happiness version of evil. And by being overly peach love and happiness, and believing the whole world is peace love and happiness, they end up doing evil, because they really didn't spend enough time thinking about, there are actually nasty people out there. Google puts a lot of effort into security in things like Chrome."

cool stuff :)

Sep 22, 2010

GAME CITY - Gaming findet Stadt

GAME CITY - Gaming findet Stadt

Game City is a small game event here in Vienna. Very nice, go there if you can ..

Sep 14, 2010

Ubuntu, Canonical and motivations

Mark Shuttleworth - Reflections on Ubuntu, Canonical and the march to free software adoption

very insightful post. Totally true in my opinion as an outsider from Ubuntu/Canonical. I'm just a regular user of Ubuntu and thats just what I see Canonical and the Ubuntu Community do every day. And I love it! Hope they continue for a long long time with that.

Best Part of the long post:
When Ubuntu was conceived, the Linux ecosystem was in a sense fully formed. We had a kernel. We had GNOME and KDE. We had X and libc and GCC and all the other familiar tools. Sure they had bugs and they had shortcomings and they had roadmaps to address them. But there was something missing: sometimes it got articulated as “marketing”, sometimes as “end-user focus”. I remember thinking “that’s what I could bring”. So Ubuntu, and Canonical, have quite explicitly NOT put effort into things which are obviously working quite well, instead, we’ve tried to focus on new ideas and new tools and new components.

Sep 9, 2010

Debunking the 1% Myth

Debunking the 1% Myth - O'Reilly Broadcast

nicely put together. Not much new for me, but basicly what I think about the market share. I would put linux as well on about 8-10% share. Mac slightly more ..

I did start to think about "actual usage" a bit somewhere around january of this year. I came to the same conclusion as noted ini this articel. On bigger tracking websites linux market share is usually somewhere around 0.5-2%. And back then I suspected that this just can't be true. I know too many people using linux and the linux world just is too big for that.

The only thing I didn't know from this webstat tracking sites is which sites they take the data from. So I came to the conclusion that it's likely they use a lot of sites that favor windows users. A extreme example would be if they would take data from microsoft.com, msdn.com and sites like that. These sites have a lot of traffic but of course almost only from windows users (which may run a dual boot system). There just is no reason to go to these sites if you are on linux as they don't offer linux software or any help on linux.

Sep 8, 2010

6 dimensions of Open Source

The 6 dimensions of Open Source - Seeing the fnords

Good points for Open Source. Well put together.

Sep 1, 2010

Aug 29, 2010

The game layer on top of the world

Seth Priebatsch: The game layer on top of the world | Video on TED.com

good talk. In my opinion its important to include games in a lot of things. Games can be a very good motivator for boring tasks like learning or doing displeasing things. I'm sure this one is going to be big in the years to come. But they need to be done right ..

Aug 28, 2010

Good&Bad: Commercial Stuff & Linux

There are a few "new" commercial linux things I wanna point out. They aren't really new but I feel like we are at the start of something here. First hardware with linux preinstalled.

There is system76. They seem to have great systems. Biggest problem there is that they don't ship internationally. I would have bought one years ago if they would. Instead, I had to buy a Dell netbook with Windows on it. Never once booted it up, installed Ubuntu right from the start. Worked very well so far. Back then system76 had laptops with the Ubuntu logo on them, now they only seem to have laptops with their logo. It's a shame, would have loved one with an Ubuntu logo on it.

Even better seems ZaReason and what they offer. I would love to get a Hoverboard X30. In my opinion they should spend a little more money on design. I don't think they look bad, but they could look a bit more shiny. Oh and before I forget about it. The "Open Hardware Warranty" is great, just what I want to have and one of the reasons why I put my desktop PCs together myself.

There are others as well but these two stood out to me. Remember that you can get a linux PC from Dell as well. I am very satisfied with my current Dell netbook. Did come with Windows but works well with Ubuntu so far. Just the WiFi N card (did cost me extra) needs a driver installed. Which tells me to never ever buy anything from Broadcom.

On the commercial Software side there is finally a well looking site that shows you what you can get for linux. The site is LinApp and looks very nice. They have a few great games. And a lot of other software I didn't know existed. In my opinion this is one major reason that linux isn't used (and supported by software companies) more often. There just hasn't been a good place to find quality software. I hope LinApp can fill that gap ...

Aug 25, 2010

Packaging software in Linux (deb)

Ubuntu Linux Tips & Tricks: Is packaging new software hard?

Looks like a good and simple guide to follow for DEB packaging. I just wish there would be a simple wizard styled thing that even automated these few steps. Additionally it should keep a "config" file where it saves my input so I need to set in once for a project. From that point on I just click on "generate deb" and be done with it. Would be awesome! :)

Aug 23, 2010

Good&Bad: Slashdot

The last days I ask myself: What has happened in recent years to slashdot? It has been the best source for interesting news on IT and other Nerdy topics. Nowadays you still have some on slashdot but a lot of good things aren't on it anymore.

It all started about a week ago. I was watching the Linux Action Show (love that show) and they made a few comments in that direction. That got me thinking. Now it seems so obvious to me and I don't know why I didn't see that trend earlier. Likely its because I read slashdot together with a lot of other blogs in my RSS reader since years. So I didn't notice that more and more of the good stories where from other blogs and not from slashdot.

Then the newest Linux Action Show mentioned it again. And I think they are totally right with that. There was a time when it meant something to get slashdotted. This usually meant for most sites that they where down. Slashdot redirected so much traffic to them that the servers just couldn't handle it. I haven't seen that happen in at least a year or two. So I assume they are generating a lot less traffic these days than back in the old days when they still had "News for Nerds & Stuff that matters".

I mean there are things that didn't change like the ugly website style :D. It's been like that as long as I can remember. But then the voting system for news seems new to me. I did see it years ago but never used it or thought about it. But now I think it may be one of the fundamental reasons the news changed on slashdot.

I imagine that in the "early" days there was a very informed audience reading slashdot and suggesting news. From that slashdot emerged as a very good source of news for nerds (and later generally for all tech enthusiasts). Then they switched to this crowd sourced approach to "filter" news. I guess it did work pretty well in these days. But slashdot got more and more popular and more and more people without the needed tech understanding flooded in and voted as well. But they not just voted for what they want to see. They also started to downvote what they didn't understand or just didn't like. I think they should at least remove that downvoting. In my opinion thats just a very bad idea for a site like slashdot (or any other specialized news source that has a lot of opinionated people reading it).

The best thing would be to remove the voting system all together and replace it with a few capable nerds filtering through the news that gets submitted. They should go back to the "old" system that worked well and made them so famous. The crowd just doesn't know about "good" news, they only know about what they like (or dislike). Sadly thats just not the same.

They could influence opinions and direct people to good things that happen in Open Source every day. It makes me sad that they don't use the influence they still have to help Open Source. Instead they are just following the masses like sheeps do...

Aug 16, 2010

Oracle vs. Google, OpenSolaris

I'm asking myself what Oracle thinks is in it for them. I really don't think that even if they win this the end result will be a positive one for them. To my understanding the primary customers of Oracles software are developers and they are pissing of a lot of them right now. They are generating a lot of FUD on their own products.

There are a lot of people blogging about that, and it generally doesn't look like its going anywhere good for Oracle. Even if Google is the "bad" one here it's still a lot of bad PR for Oracle. Bad PR that directly hits Oracles Customers.

I guess it will take years for that lawsuit to settle ...

Aug 9, 2010

Ubuntu Light Themes

An Update to the Ubuntu Light Themes - Canonical Design

I like that a lot. Very nice refinements, can't wait to use that on my desktop.

Aug 8, 2010

Machinarium by Amanita Design

Machinarium Pirate Amnesty

great game for a very low price. only till 12th so go hurry ..

Jul 29, 2010

Power of Research - Trailer (New)

Power of Research - Trailer

We released a new, updated trailer to our upcoming browser game.

Jul 24, 2010

Lifehacker's linux software choice

Lifehacker Pack for Linux: Our List of the Best Linux Downloads

good stuff there, most I already use. Two I don't know about (Tilda/Yakuake, Handbrake) gonna try Tilda or Yakuake as that sounds like a fun thing to have.

Jul 5, 2010

The Linux Action Show!

RETRO: The Linux Action Show! s9e02 | Jupiter Broadcasting

Great show, and don't miss the other shows they have :). The show about Beer is cool :D

Jul 4, 2010

OMG! Ubuntu is great!

I really like reading OMG! Ubuntu. The information there is great and I wouldn't know about a lot of fancy new things without them. I read a lot of interesting sites about gandgets, geekdom and other nerdy topic related sites/planet feeds. But it has been a long time since I found a site that I like as much as OMG Ubuntu. Its new Ubuntu stuff for the enduser. Far better then what I've found on the Ubuntu/Gnome planet feeds. And by far better I mean easier to use for an enduser. Most of the time its very simple to get the stuff running on your own Ubuntu machine.

I still doubt that a novice user would get everything on that site to work (or that he even should). Sometimes the terminal is still needed. But for a technically interested user its doable. A lot of bloggers/sites just do this wrong. They require their users to have knowledge that they usually don't. Cmdline should be avoided at any cost if you want normal users to try what you post on your blog. E.g: some write a terminal apt-get install line. That can be done over a single click link as well. Of course you need to click on that link from your Ubuntu install but thats what people usually do if they try something new.

I think there's a lot of cmdline out there that could easily be avoided. This makes it look fare more complex to install a simple software on Ubuntu than it actually is. And yes, I know cmdline isn't hard, its just that most normal users aren't used to it. This makes it look hard for them (if it really is or not doesn't matter, most of the time they aren't going to even try). Hope that this changes soon ...

Jun 23, 2010

HTML5Rocks

HTML5Rocks - Home

Great site on HTML5. I like the interactive slides a lot :). Well done ...

Jun 22, 2010

Nautilus Mockups

The perfect File Manager? | OMG! Ubuntu!

very nice design, would love to see that implemented in gnome :). Very Chrome like ^^

Jun 10, 2010

Jun 9, 2010

10 HTML5 Games

10 HTML5 Games Paving The Way | Web.AppStorm

very nice games for HTML and JS :)

Jun 7, 2010

ASP.NET Control Development

just needed a good source that explains a little more complex custom ASP.Net controls. I found this link to be a great source of information on that topic:

A Crash Course on ASP.NET Control Development: Template Properties

Jun 4, 2010

Currently annoying things

Things that I'm annoyed at:

* Software Patents. As log as they exist innovation and the evolution of all our software is slowed down and in some cases even destroyed. Of course the ones with the biggest problems are small companies closely followed by open source projects. They have no chance against a patent giant. The video-codec mess comes to mind, or exFAT on SDXC cards.

* Browser wars. They are sooo 1990. People need to inform themselves more, no one would use IE 7- anymore. I have still hopes but people tend to be soo lazy. HTML5 at least seems to move fast everywhere except IE of course. If you use Opera/Firefox/Chrome or Safari just makes no big difference as it should be the case. Who cares what you use as long as it works fast and looks the same everywhere.

* State of music/movies. I wanna buy music, but I'm not gonna do that with the current system. It just sucks, its too complicated. Not to start with how expensive it is to buy something. I have hopes that they manage to at least get into the evolving cloud stuff. My music everywhere, that's great. If they would start to make it really cheap to buy a song people would get crazy for that. They need to make it so cheap that the gain of illegally downloading a song is just too small. I mean why should I use my time to search for a illegal copy if I can just pay 10 cent and have the song without any work involved besides searching for it on a internet platform.

* Hardware vendors which try to be software companies. Means they make closed source drivers and do a horrible job at that. Creative comes to mind ..

* Ruby. Great language, but why is everyone using python these days? Python makes so ugly code compared the the freedom you have in Ruby. I would any day choose ruby over python if the language is the only deciding point. Also, I couldn't use python in any big project. Its just too hard to maintain. Too much work on keeping the code clean. Don't get me wrong, python is great but ruby is just better so why not choose the better language?

* Android fragmentation. Fragmentation is a natural thing in Software and only a very small problem. There is only one platform which keeps fragmentation small that's Apple and its iPhone/iPad. But that's all explained very simple: Apple tells you what you can use and have, not you. You buy an Apple product and Apple decides what you do with it no one else. With Android (and other systems like WinMo) you (and the companies using it on their devices) have the freedom. I have Android 2.1 on ma HTC Hero, no problem just a bit of following instructions. HTC will soon release a official 2.1 for Hero. You just can't do that with an Apple product without a lot of work.

May 25, 2010

Nasty problem with Blend 4

So the last two work days my boss and I where looking for a rather nasty little problem in our internal controls library for SL4. For some reasons Blend 4 (RC) told us on some simple properties of out controls (in global.xaml) that they didn't exist. So designing with blend didn't work anymore in all our project using our lib. This only applied to simple properties, more complex ones worked just fine. In our case this are mostly Boolean and Double propeties.

The error we get in Blend is: The member 'XXX' is not recognized or is not accessible.

We tried a lot of different things to get some more detailed information to the problem Blend has with our lib. No chance. So I started to create a new project and copy one control after the other to the new one. In the end all controls worked fine in the new project. So where was the problem you ask? Well, it turns out that we had one missing reference which doesn't raise any problem in VS or the final application. Just Blend can't find it and with that doesn't know about these basic properties.

The problem is a reference added by default if you create a new project. For some reason it was missing in ours (don't ask me why). Its the 'mscorlib.dll' located within 'Program Files\Reference Asssemblies\Microsoft\Framework\Silverlight\v4.0'. After adding that one everything was fine with Blend again. Btw. if it should be missing in your project you need to add it by editing the project file. For some reason you can't add it in VS's project properties.

Hope this saves some hours of time for somebody :)

May 12, 2010

Power of Research Teaser




Power of Research Teaser Game

Our game teaser is online now. Play with it, have fun. Feedback welcome ..

May 10, 2010

Mark Shuttleworth on Window indicators

Mark Shuttleworth - Blog Archive - Window indicators

I always enjoy Mark Shuttleworth blog posts. Very enlightening as usual, a lot of developments are more clear now ..

May 9, 2010

The Humble Indie Bundle




The Humble Indie Bundle (pay what you want for five awesome indie games)
great indie games for the price you wanna pay for. Very nice :) .. and some charity is in there as well ..

May 7, 2010

Ryzom Open Source MMORPG

The MMORPG Ryzom goes open source! - Ryzom

I like that, not what I would do with such a project, but still nice.

Personally I would open source the engine and tools. In my opinion Artwork should stay original to a game. Now other hobby games will start to use the good artwork and mostly make a bad impression event with it. This will only create a negative force on Ryzom. "Oh, .. this looks like that other really bad game I played once. I better try an other one .. "

Ubuntu 10.04 Post-Install Guide

The Silent Number: Ubuntu 10.04 Post-Install Guide: What to do and try after installing Lucid Lynx!

great guide to explore some nice software after a ubuntu install :) ..

May 3, 2010

Silverlight & WPF Timeline Control

This is a very nice and good looking timeline control for silverlight and WPF. Since a few days I'm a developer at the project as well. I just send my first commit to the projects SVN server. Mostly I'm gonna fix bugs so you all can use it with a little less fuss. My time is very limited so don't expect any fancy new features from me ...

Apr 27, 2010

Aves Engine - HTML/JavaScript



wow .. great engine demo :)

Apr 19, 2010

Software Patents broke the system

Patent Absurdity — How software patents broke the system

they have a good video on software patents and how they are used.

Apr 14, 2010

The 3D Truth in old Masters



haha ... great video :)

Apr 9, 2010

YouTube - PIXELS



very cool video, all those old games :)

Mar 29, 2010

USB and SD card adapter for iPad

iPad Camera Connection Kit finally surfaces for pre-order, still absurdly overpriced -- Engadget

Quote of the day: "Of course, one could easily argue that the iPad should have native support for both of these widely used formats without forcing users to lug around two extra peripherals, but if that were the case, this thing just wouldn't be an Apple, now would it?" .. so true :D

My Silverlight & WPF Timeline Control Patch

I just submitted a patch to the very nice timeline control. This patch allows to update the events from code. My first patch was way more complex, but after a few changes/suggestions from the timeline developers I got it down to one method.

That's just why I as a developer love Open Source Software. If a feature isn't there I can do something about it. With a closed lib I wouldn't be able to use this nice looking timeline. So this saved me time and trouble and furthermore improved the look of the application. Very nice :)

Mar 25, 2010

Ubuntu Reads File Sizes Differently

Comments to Ubuntu 10.04 Reads File Sizes Differently - Overbenny’s Blog

this is in my opinion one of the nice changes in the upcoming Ubuntu release. Finally a unit policy that will be integrated into all default applications from now on. It will cause some confusion for sure but well, the old (non existing) system can only be described as confusing. So it can't get worse in that direction anyway :) ...

Mar 13, 2010

Summary of Ubuntu and the new theme

As I wrote before in this blog. Opinions on the (wrong) new position of the window buttons in the new Ubuntu theme getting more. Here a summary of a few of the very good points copied from YokoZar's Writings Blog.
  • Because the window title isn’t centered, the window controls being placed directly in front of it put it in a weird indented position
  • The “slightly off left” location is inconsistent with Nautilus, Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin, Empathy, and every other tabbed program we have, which have close buttons for their tabs on the right.
  • The left position is inconsistent with Windows, previous versions of Ubuntu, and even OSX – users have to relearn decades of muscle memory.
  • Users who interact with both Windows and Ubuntu machines (or migrate from Windows) will have a much harder time than they did before.
  • The buttons are too close to the file and edit menus, making catastrophic misclicks much more likely.  Closing something on accident should be as rare as possible.
  • Even without misclicking, a user will have to take more time to use the window control and avoid a misclick.  This is an example of Fitt’s Law.
  • The close position is also inconsistent with the power button in upper right.  Currently, “close it down” is something you can always do from the upper right anywhere in the system: within a tab, within a window, and even for the whole computer.  The new window controls break that entirely.
  • The new position leaves a lot of empty, wasted space in the upper right of most windows.  While strictly speaking the amount of unused space is the same, it looks much worse when it’s all clustered together.  When the controls are on the right, the extra space can function as a buffer for the potentially destructive window controls.
  • Similarly, the upper left of most windows now becomes much more crowded, creating a rather unpleasing contrast to the relatively empty upper right.
  • In previous Ubuntus you could close windows on the left if you really wanted, by expanding the small circle menu that’s now gone entirely.  File->Quit is also an option, which is now very close to the close box.
  • Gnome upstream has them on the right, causing consistency and developmental problems when we deviate.  This is particularly jarring with the adoption of future projects like Gnome shell and Gnome 3, which will change again how we interact with window controls.
  • The current implementation breaks themes not designed for the new button order (which is currently every theme we ship, so even changing the theme back doesn’t help)
  • A day before User Interface freeze of a long term support release is the worst possible time to suddenly spring this on everyone without explanation.
  • It is very difficult to change them back as we don’t have any UI tool for doing this (the current method is manually editing gconf keys)
  • The new position doesn’t actually do anything beneficial.
there are a few very good reasons in there for not placing the buttons on the left side. In my opinion the strongest points are:
  • "wong position for importance" (as noted in my own post)
  • "weird indented position" as its in front of the window title
  • "buttons to close to menu bar" (more on the menu bar problem likely in an other post)
  • "inconsistency" with themes (most/every theme shipped right now), tab close buttons, shutdown button, document close buttons (all on the right)
  • "crowded corner" the upper left is now full of things, upper right is empty.
  • "new position isn't beneficial"
And what others also already noted. The best UI still has the Chrome/Chromium browser especially with its way of using the title bar as well as the menu bar. Best design I've seen so far.

Mar 12, 2010

Dendemann - Stumpf ist Trumpf 3.0

Recently I'm a bit addicted to this song & video. So great :)

Dendemann - Stumpf ist Trumpf 3.0

Dendemann | MySpace Musikvideos

Ich hätte sicher noch ne scharmante Idee, für ne Parodie, auf en verdammtes Klischee.
Ich könnt labern wenn ich wollt, voll so intelligent, immer Zeitlos doch niemals hinter dem Trend.
Und dann hätt ich sicher noch, en mörder Zitat aus nem wichtigen Buch das ich hörbar nicht mag,
doch ich würde immer Platz lassen zwichen den Zeilen, für die nachhaltigkeit, mit dem erfrischenden Style.

And the video, sooo MacGyver! :)

Mar 10, 2010

Rethinking the UI Paradigm of IDE

Code Bubbles Project: Rethinking the User Interface Paradigm of Integrated Development Environments

WOW! ... that looks fantastic. I need to try that sometime. Looks like it's a lot more productive than the current system. Very good idea..

Mar 9, 2010

Patents

ignore the code: Patents

and again, Patents suck hard .. -.-

Unity3D 3.0 Development Platform

Unity Technologies Unveils Third Generation of Its Powerful Development Platform

uhh ... I like that! ... just add some linux support to it and I'm totally for that platform :). Hope I am able to try something with that soon ...

Mar 8, 2010

New theme in Ubuntu 10.04

This post will mostly be about one thing I dislike about the new Ubuntu theme. So first in short what I like about it. I like the general direction its going, the style, the ideas behind it. I hope it continues that way. Also I can see how this theme can very well evolve into a Gnome Shell theme later. I think it will look great.

Now on to the more fun part. The thing I dislike on whats currently there. I'm referring here to the screenshots found on the official Ubuntu site at the moment: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Brand

As a lot of other people already wrote, what I dislike the most is the new style and position of the window buttons. Most people take the most obvious route of claiming that the position is plainly wrong. They are on the top-left corner just like in MacOS. I think this is the wrong position, as Mac has it wrong but I can see why Mac is not going to change that. MacOS has a lot of beautiful things and a very good design, but thats one of the areas where they are wrong. Ubuntu's design makes the buttons even worse than Mac.

The wrong position is not my major complain. I used a Mac a couple of times. I'm not used to it and will not claim that I am. I only use them rarely, as I think most users do. That's why I don't care too much about the position, I just think its wrong because they are now on the most prominent and important spot on a window. And this is just wrong for their importance.

In my opinion this is one point where Windows got it completely right. The most important things on a window are the window Icon and the title. This should be on top and left. The buttons to control window states aren't as important. They are even less important than the window content. So positioning them up there is just wrong. Windows has them there rightfully. The title of a window usually isn't as long and that corner would just be empty wasted space most of the time. So putting these buttons there is a good, space saving thing.

Mac is wrong for the same reasons. But they applied some very good design to them so they doesn't stand out too much.

Now Ubuntu does one to me even more bizarre thing. They make these buttons stand out way too much. It even distracts from the window content so much that I notice it anytime I look at a window. In my opinion they can even let the buttons be on the left if they think that improves anything. But they should definitely change the highlighting of these buttons. If the theme stays as distracting as it is now I have to change the border style. I just find it too distracting from the rest.

This could be fixed by removing that ugly "container" border for these buttons. It is of no real use and removes edges from the design which is always a very good thing. Also they should only color the buttons as you hover them. Right now it just makes them too important. The same is true for the Scrollbars I see on these screenshots. Way to highlighted for an unimportant thing as a Scrollbar. They stand out too much compared to the rest.

Also they didn't fix the flawed window border from the old theme. It's still way to small to be usable for resizing the window. The new Windows theme makes this beautifully. There are a few Gnome themes which do this as well. As long as the window is not maximized there is a thick border so the border is easily dragable. As soon as the window is maximized it disappears. But I think that may still change as the theme doesn't look finished right now. At least I hope they still fix a few things till the release of Ubuntu 10.04.

Mar 3, 2010

Ogg objections | Hardwarebug

Ogg objections | Hardwarebug

good read. I already wondered about the OGG format.

Apple is always fun to watch ..

Steve Jobs, last week:
We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it.

Steve Jobs, 1996:
...Picasso had a saying he said good artists copy great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.

I guess its good to see Apple taking steps against Android. That means Apple already fears Android. And I think they have any right to fear Android as it is where the iPhone will never be able to go to. Open, Featurefull, Simple ... I really like that I can do and use what I want on my phone. It feels so powerful and so open and ready for any task. The iPhone is nothing compared to that, just a nice looking feature phone. I don't even know why they call it smartphone, don't see anything smart there.

oh and btw. Patents suck hard ..

Feb 11, 2010

Facebook Chat Launches XMPP Support

Facebook Chat Launches XMPP Support

I like that move. Really good, jabber ftw!

Feb 4, 2010

Microsoft’s Creative Destruction

Op-Ed Contributor - Microsoft’s Creative Destruction - NYTimes.com

good read ... and so true from what I experience and see. There are only two things I can think of right now that feel "edgy" from MS. The new Zune OS thingy and development stuff like .Net and Silverlight/WPF (incl Expression stuff) ... but this stuff's already getting old again and for most of the things others did already catch up.

Jan 20, 2010

Jan 18, 2010

Top 10 Programming Fonts (from Hivelogic)

Hivelogic - Top 10 Programming Fonts

well I'm using "Deja Vu Sans Mono" a long time now. I think its the best for coding and terminal use. It just looks very clean. Maybe I should give "Inconsolata" a try. But right now I don't really see any advantage ..

Jan 12, 2010

Austria Game Jam 2010

Austria Game Jam 2010 | 29.-31. Jänner Maybe, maybe, you'll find me there, coding stuff, you know :D

Jan 5, 2010

Custom Panels in Silverlight/WPF

I just found this nice little tutorial. Now finally my FillLayout and DayPanel work as I want them to ^^.

Custom Panels in Silverlight/WPF: Introduction - Like pancakes...